


london calling

by whitmans_kiss



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Mild Language, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-01
Updated: 2010-06-01
Packaged: 2018-01-15 21:35:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1320019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitmans_kiss/pseuds/whitmans_kiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Gideon is dead. Fabian's dead, too."</p>
<p>And Sirius might have felt guilty if there had been anything he could do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	london calling

“Gideon is dead.”

It was raining, and Remus was standing on the balcony, an umbrella propped against his shoulder, one hand curled around the railing while the other held a cigarette in a peculiar way. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, and Sirius couldn’t tell anymore where the blood had stained the hem of his robes from the water that had seeped up the fabric.

“Fabian’s dead, too,” Remus continued, the smoke he exhaled as he spoke making it look like it was five below outside instead of the thick twenty-five degrees that it was.

Sirius didn’t say anything, frowning as the edge of his umbrella caught with Remus’ and his hair came untucked from behind his ears.

“Gideon went down first. I told Fabian to get his left, watch his left, but then Gideon went down and then Fabian did, too, and he didn’t get his left in time. I couldn’t do anything. I was dueling MacNair by the steps. And then Gideon went down, and then Fabian did, too.”

Sirius wanted to ask where Remus' shoes were. He’d been certain Remus had been wearing them when Moody debriefed them after the raid, and now there was a puddle forming on the concrete in the depression that had been worn by previous tenants always standing there. Remus flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette over the side of the balcony, letting it fall on London with the rest of the pollutants that choked up the rain and the air and stopped up the tears, because they couldn’t afford to cry anymore, not when the weather could do it for them. They couldn't cry because they had to continue on with their missions, because the missions were what was important, even though it wasn’t like Sirius knew what anyone else in the Order was actually _doing,_ anyway, unless they were on a raid, because everyone knows exactly what you’re doing when you're fighting with one wand in your hand and another in your face, even if nobody knows what side you’re really fighting for. But he trusted Dumbledore, even if he couldn’t trust Remus, because you couldn’t trust someone who disappeared for two weeks and then turned up just in time for a raid on a meeting that no one outside the Order could have known about, and had done such a thing before, and was now standing on your balcony in a downpour wearing no shoes.

And was smoking. Remus never smoked. Prefect Moony used to nick points from fifth year Hufflepuffs for smoking behind the greenhouses. But that was a long time ago, when they had been boys, still, when they knew each other and believed in good and evil and there had been trust in their eyes and their hearts, and then Sirius remembered that the Prewetts had smoked and then suddenly the cigarettes make _sense._

They had been together, Fabian and Gideon and Remus, the three of them, Sirius realized, _together._ Fabian and Gideon, never doing anything without the other, even dying – never alone, and Remus, who had really never known anything but loneliness, even within the Marauders. James and Sirius had taken in Remus and Peter because they happened to room with them – Remus especially, because the taboo of his lycanthropy fascinated them – that they had happened to become good mates in the process was really just a matter of luck and circumstances.

And Sirius might have felt guilty, spending so much time with James, with girls whose names he didn’t remember now and probably hadn’t known at the time, either, but if he wasn’t going to feel guilty over neglecting Peter for all these years then there was no point in feeling guilty over Remus, who _had_ someone – someones, people - love, or something like it. More than he ever would, anyway. Or just different, perhaps, Sirius thought, and realized that Remus had never told him about being with the Prewetts.

Now that he thought about it, Remus had never told him a lot of things, like that he smoked or fancied blokes or where the hell he was for those two weeks or where he was living now that James had gone into hiding and stopped paying his expenses, and Sirius realized that the reason Remus had never told him is because he had never asked.

Not like it mattered, anyway. Nothing mattered anymore these days except the missions, and you didn't ask about those.

"I couldn't do _anything,_ Sirius."

Remus took another drag and dropped his shoulder, tipping the umbrella back so that the rain fell on his face, screwing his eyes shut as his face contorted in an expression of unimaginable pain, chest catching as his hand on the railing gripped the iron so hard his whole arm shook, his whole body shook like a fucking leaf in September, and then his mouth opened and Sirius’ ears closed.

A sound like a soul being ripped in half, anguish toxic enough to cut through the dense smog and carry itself through all the closed windows of people who would never know what it felt like to watch their lovers murdered, to fight a war that had a point you couldn’t see most of the time, to feel so godsdamned _alone_ that you stood in the rain with no shoes on and smoked cigarettes taken from a corpse just to occupy your hands so you didn’t put a wand to your head instead, because in the morning you had another mission to leave for, and the missions were what was important, not grief, not death; there’s no fucking time for grief in a war; what a fucking _waste_ of resources.

Remus’ cigarette slipped from his fingers; Sirius watched as it extinguished itself in the puddle, and might have felt guilty if there had been anything he could do.

But there wasn’t, and they both knew it, so he went back inside and figured someone might as well tell Molly, because Alice already knew and Remus hadn’t any shoes on.


End file.
